Project Update: July 2020

LocalCoinSwap has continued to rapidly build, expand, and grow the platform over the last couple of months. We have achieved several milestones, secured a big-name collaboration, and implemented a slew of platform and project updates.

Many everyday users may not notice the small incremental improvements that our fantastic development team pushes regularly. However, once you look back, it becomes quickly apparent how far the project has come and why more and more users are choosing LocalCoinSwap as their P2P platform of choice!

Welcome to all the new traders, and below are some of the recent project highlights:

New Volume Milestone

On July 28, LocalCoinSwap achieved a new record in trade volume, with over $150,000 USD (not AUD) traded in a single day. In addition, this was also the highest real volume in those 24 hours out of any non-custodial or multi-custodial P2P exchange.

LocalCoinSwap is quickly becoming recognized as the best choice for non-custodial and P2P trading!

New Homepage:

This revised homepage is eye-catching and gives a great introduction to what LocalCoinSwap is, the benefits, and the P2P trading process. Simplifying all the essential information about a high-tech project down from a wall of text to a bright and aesthetic page is never an easy task. Still, we have already received great responses and significant improvements in conversion metrics thanks to this update:

Check it out here: https://localcoinswap.com/

Increased User Growth rate

Over the last 2 months, we have experienced a considerable uptick in user acquisition. An average of 100% more users are signing up each day, in comparison to the previous 2 months. This growth is continuing to increase.

Improved notification speed and reliability

Due to the growth spurt experienced in new users, there were, unfortunately, a few growing pains that came along with it. Some of the internal services that we use to provide notifications to new users became congested, causing delays in important messages we delivered to users. These included new trade notifications (email, Telegram, and SMS), and trade message notifications. As soon as these delays started, we focused 100% of efforts to set up dedicated servers specifically to get you emails and trade notifs as fast as possible. The updated notification servers were completed and launched within two days, and everything is now back up and running smoothly.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused during this growth spurt.

PS, if anyone's "lightning response" status has been affected by recent notification delays, let us know, and we'll give you the badge back!

Customer Support Metrics

Anyone that has dealt with the customer support team at LocalCoinSwap knows that this is an area we take seriously, and if you have ever had to deal with support or disputes on other P2P platforms, you probably know how bad the situation can get.

Over the last two months, we are pleased to announce that the average response time for a LocalCoinSwap support ticket is 102 minutes. And the average time to resolution is 1.7 hours. In addition, our dedicated customer service team has a satisfaction rating of over 89% of all reviewed tickets that have come through the support portal.

If you have any issues or questions when using LocalCoinSwap, please raise a support ticket and someone from our support team will be happy to assist!

Non-Custodial Bitcoin Update

The team is still working hard to bring you non-custodial BTC wallets and trading. We believe that offering an alternative to a custodial solution is of utmost importance in a world and industry trending toward the over-regulation of cryptocurrencies. We are pleased to announce that the process is completed end to end and we are still working on UI improvements to make the process as seamless as possible. This new addition to LocalCoinSwap is an inherently complicated feature, so rather than rushing the launch, we are ensuring that we roll out a fully-fledged, UX optimized, and fault tested product.

Users are now able to export their account mnemonic and use this to derive their non-custodial BTC wallets. More will be announced on the roll-out schedule and process soon!

New Collaboration - Kusama

We are working with the Kusama project to allow non-custodial P2P trading of KSM on the LocalCoinSwap platform. Kusama is known as the cousin of Polkadot - a multi-chain network founded by Gavin Wood, one of the co-creators and CTO of Ethereum, and president of the Web3 Foundation.

As Kusama is such a new technology, much of the functionality needed to build a non-custodial P2P integration did not yet exist. LocalCoinSwap has worked with the community-led Kusama Treasury to fund this expansion of the underlying Kusama capabilities and open up accessibility to everyone.

For more information about the integration, check out this blog post:
https://blog.localcoinswap.com/localcoinswap-builds-on-kusama/

SMS Notification Improvements

We have updated the SMS system to improve deliverability and fix some issues with the mismatched SMS language. An SMS will never be a 100% dependable system for worldwide applications, due to the reliance on 1000’s of different network operators in hundreds of different regions. However, these updates have seen a significant reduction in SMS failure rates. We realize that not everyone wants to check their emails continuously throughout the day, s we also suggest setting up Telegram notifications for better deliverability regardless of your region:
https://blog.localcoinswap.com/new-p2p-feature-telegram-notifications-for-new-trades-and-messages/

New Exchange Rates

Thanks to feedback from both old and new traders from the LATAM regions, we have added two new exchange rates.

Blue dollar rate -  This is the unofficial (black market) exchange rate for the Argentine Peso. This much better represents the exchange rate you would get if you exchanged r on the street in Argentina. Users can select either the official ARS rate or the Blue dollar ARS rate (ARG).

Venezuelan black market rate -  As above, the official exchange rate for the Venezuelan currency (bolívar Soberano “VES”) is not representative of the real exchange rate. As such, users selecting VES when creating offers are now using the black market rate rather than the official rate.

Improved Fee Estimation for ETH and Token trades

Recently, transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain have become more expensive due to increased network congestion. This increased activity has led to uncertainty around the cost of paying the gas fees to complete non-custodial Ethereum and ETH-based token trades on the LocalCoinSwap platform. There are errors shown to users with inadequate ETH balances; however, these were not being updated often enough to accurately represent current fees leading to frustrations when users did not deposit sufficient funds to cover the fees.

We have improved these estimates, and the figures provided to users should now be more accurate. We apologize to the few users that were affected at the times of turbulent gas prices.

Translation Updates

Given the many updates over the last couple of months (homepage + more), there has been a vast amount of additional localization needed. Given that Spanish is our second biggest market after English, we have gone through the platform manually to ensure all translations are up to date to provide a smooth onboarding and trading experience for our Spanish language users.

The LocalCoinSwap platform is also localized into seven other languages, including Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Korean, Malay, and Chinese. We don’t currently have team members who are native in all these languages, so if anyone has any suggested translation improvements, please don’t hesitate to reach out, and we can make updates!

Additional Scam Prevention Functionality

As a P2P platform, there will always be bad actors out there who try to take advantage of other users. We take this seriously and spend a portion of our time each week analyzing the latest scam attempts and looking at what we can implement to reduce them.

Over the last couple of months, we have made and trialed many changes. Many of you will have noticed the additional warning shown to users when they first enter a trade on the platform. This gives a further overview of the trade process and how to avoid scams and links to useful resources about staying safe while P2P trading. We have also optimized some of the content through the trade flow to ensure it is more understandable to newcomers.

Unfortunately, a small portion of new users will still ignore the warnings and ignore the correct trade flow, so we have developed some algorithms to help better detect scam accounts and trades. We can’t go too deep into how these work for obvious reasons, but we are pleased to announce that these measures have seen a significant reduction in scams and fraud attempts.

We also trialed locking the trade chat box until a trade was accepted in order to reduce scam attempts further. However, we received feedback from several users (that was also mirrored in the metrics) that this resulted in a lower trade completion rate and a more frustrating trade process. So after a few days, we reversed this feature.

Scam reduction will always be a never-ending task, and we will continue working to keep our users as safe as possible.

Staying safe and avoiding scams is relatively simple from a user perspective so long as you follow the correct trade flow and are aware of a few important things. Please read this post for more info:
https://blog.localcoinswap.com/how-to-avoid-scams-when-trading-p2p/

Page Speed Updates

In addition to the work outlined in the previous update, we have further optimized the page speed of many pages throughout the site in order to improve the user experience. We still proudly maintain the position of having the fastest P2P platform on the market! It’s 2020, and no one wants to be waiting minutes for a page to load!

There have also been many other updates, improvements, user interaction, and marketing efforts over this period that have resulted in these great few months of progress at LocalCoinSwap. Expect to see much more growth and development in the upcoming periods, too - promising times to come!

Thank you to all our fantastic users, and as always, we continue to welcome feedback on how we can best serve you and the greater crypto community.

Happy trading!